Despite all of the parties that were said to be interested in acquiring pieces of stricken smartphone vendor BlackBerry, breaking up the company was never an option that was on the table, sources claim.
The Canadian firm spent six weeks trying to sell itself off but ultimately failed. Instead, it ended up with nothing more than …

Oops!!

I can understand their concerns given the legal strictures, but they had better be making some calls to bring some suitors back to the table. Otherwise, they are definitely going to end up getting picked over in bankruptcy.

Imagine for a moment...

Re: Imagine for a moment...

And think of how much money and time they would have saved with Android rather than buying QNX (which is an excellent product)... They already had the tablet... they could have gone Android 3 years ago!

Re: Imagine for a moment...

"And think of how much money and time they would have saved with Android rather than buying QNX (which is an excellent product)... They already had the tablet... they could have gone Android 3 years ago!"

And had they done that then they would have kissed their Enterprise market goodbye. And, in case you haven't noticed, they didn't exactly ignore Android. By shipping a Dalvik VM with BB10 you could say they embraced Android in a different (and safer, arguably) way. Too bad that the mass consumer market and increasingly the corporate market doesn't seem to give a stuff about security any more.

Hail Mary

Blackberry/RIM cannot be sold as a whole... they are losing value big time. This was seen a year ago... BB10 should have been out 2 years ago.

They can try to survive as a much smaller private company.

What may save them at this point: Go Android, re-skin it to look like BB10, make their own skin/movement functions and include some of their own apps. They already have very good hardware... which CAN run Android.

Re: Hail Mary

"What may save them at this point: Go Android"

That would lose them their remaining corporate and government customers in no time. Security and performance is important in these markets and Android sucks at both. Android is a Linux / Java combination - both of which have terrible security records with extremely high vulnerability counts....

Why dump the most secure mobile OS (besides the infiltration of the NSA and miniscule microcosm of other smarter groups that barely exist...) at a time when security is becoming the most valuable aspect of any OS?

Just because the market wants glitz, glam and bling now doesn't mean it will stay that way. These are transient segments (fads).

They have a phone that works. It even competes (just). Nokia has already thrown out the baby and failed doing so.

If they have a market-share problem:

i. Get the investors to give back profit (in order to reap the rewards later) by buying cool apps to give away free and nourish the OS and its ecosystem with them. Bring in new blood- and ensure the dev team has the best people so they can build the best OS. Apple and Nokia have a few available at least...

ii. Fund the secure porting of apps that only develop for the Orchard and the Borg (thus helping everyone improve overall security within their apps) and getting free PR for doing so?

This would bring the focus back to the OS being vulnerable, rather than the apps which are so commonly, wide-open. Also it'd help them to avoid building up legacy code and releasing new features. All BB has to do is establish some public metrics around code quality, security and performance and help the community.

Not that you'd call any of it that as the NASDAQ analysts would only like what it delivers.